McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works. Here, McCarthy squirts liquid out of a bottle held near his crotch onto a stuffed animal in the shape of a lion. The costuming, materials, and simulated bodily functions frequently appear in McCarthy’s work, which often disturbingly juxtaposes visceral and startling manipulation of the body with the cheerful artifacts of popular consumer culture.
Known for his transgressive performance art pieces that often challenge social conventions, Paul McCarthy is undoubtedly one of the main figures in the West Coast contemporary art scene. Using different forms from pop culture as source material, McCarthy casts a critical look at American society and consumerism. With a particularly poignant sense humor, his works also investigate the intricacies of human psychology.
Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
The Pixelated Revolution is a lecture-performance by artist Rabih Mroué about the use of mobile phones during the Syrian revolution...
Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
La Sombra (The Shadow) is a video of Regina Jose Galindo performing with a moving Leopard tank...
For his series of digital collages Excerpt (Sealed)… Rhodes appropriated multiple images from mass media and then sprayed an X on top of their glass and frame...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
Untitled (Wall Street’s Chosen Few…) is typical of Pettibon’s drawings in which fragments of text and image are united, but yet gaps remain in their signification...
Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon...
This work needs to be considered in relation to one of his performances during which people were made to queue in front of the Kunsthalle of Frankfurt in 2003 (Tate Collection)...
This work is one of Koller’s many variations which he began to use from 1970 to describe the ‘cultural situations’ he created...
Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape...
The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...